The BAGNIOS OF ALGIERS and THE GREAT SULTANA: Two Plays of Captivity.
Miguel de Cervantes published Los banos de Argel [The Bagnios of Algiers] and La Gran Sultana [The Great Sultana] in Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados (1615).
There were all sorts of hostelries and stores, liveries, an opulent opera house,
bagnios and other pleasure palaces, and, naturally, a thriving cemetery on Boot Hill.
The bottomless pit encompasses us on one side, and stews and
bagnios on the other.
Languishing in the Algerian
bagnios from which he tried to escape four times, Cervantes could reflect on the morisco counterparts to his Arab and Turkish captors, not to mention the opportunistically zealous renegades, converts from Christianity who often did not compare favorably with his compatriot (forced) converts from Islam.
Fuchs and Ilika write only that the religious fervor it represents inserts a discordant note in the play's "distinctly humanist and cosmopolitan sensibility" (Bagnios xix).
THE BAGNIOS DE ALGIERS and THE GREAT SULTANA: Two Plays of Captivity.
This civic function of shame problematizes the Captain's captivity by conferring upon it an affirmative quality through which shame is paradoxically the source of and solution to his trials in the bagnios of Algiers.
Even though the Captain and the other prisoners of the bagnios initially feared that the Renegade would reveal the escape plan and put their lives at risk if they did not accede to his insistence that he be the one to obtain the escape vessel, the Renegade continuously demonstrates his agency vis-a-vis the Captain's passivity.
As an already established honorable soldier, and as--in the opinion of Zoraida (to whom he also makes a promise)--the only true Christian gentleman to have passed through the bagnios, his silence presents a striking contradiction for his brother and the reader as well: why does the good, honorable Captain betray his word?
Situated next to the inns and palaces of Andalucia and Castilla, the soldiers' barracks of Naples, and the dank
bagnios of North Africa were islands filled with "barbaros," gold, and human sacrifice.
